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The paper describes an improved hierarchical model for the assessment of high-level design quality attributes in object-oriented designs. In this model, structural and behavioral design properties of classes, objects, and their relationships are evaluated using a suite of object-oriented design metrics. This model relates design properties such as encapsulation, modularity, coupling, and cohesion to high-level quality attributes such as reusability, flexibility, and complexity using empirical and anecdotal information. The relationship or links from design properties to quality attributes are weighted in accordance with their influence and importance. The model is validated by using empirical and expert opinion to compare with the model results on several large commercial object-oriented systems. A key attribute of the model is that it can be easily modified to include different relationships and weights, thus providing a practical quality assessment tool adaptable to a variety of demands.

Software reuse has been demonstrated to increase productivity, reduce costs and improve software quality. Most research in the area of extraction of reusable code from legacy code has concentrated on code created in the functional decomposition paradigm. However, in recent years much object-oriented code has been written. This paper describes a knowledge-based approach to the identification of reusable components in object-oriented legacy code.

Object-oriented code is considered to be inherently more reusable than functional decomposition code; however, object-oriented code can suffer from a program understanding standpoint since good object-oriented style seems to require a large number of small methods. Hence code for a particular task may be scattered widely. Thus good semantics based tools are necessary. This paper describes an approach to object-oriented code understanding that focuses largely on informal linguistic aspects of code, such as comments and identifiers. >